“She’s right.” This came from one of the Barron sisters. “Protect your pup and get help. We’ll handle—”

Shots from another part of the nearby woods came at them, Darla barely moving in time as bullets riddled the ground.

At that point, they all shifted. Janie and Roberta charged off and Darla ran after the wounded grizzly. Bears had the best noses and he was so pissed off, she knew he’d go right to one of the shooters.

Eggie heard more shots and changed his direction, heading straight for Darla. But Bubba ran into his side, pushing him off course. Eggie snarled, snapped at his kin, but Bubba didn’t back down. While they all kept running, Bubba kept pushing.

Thankfully during that little bit of time, Eggie’s years of military training kicked in. Although he wanted to run right to Darla’s side and swoop her up, his battle-ready side knew he couldn’t. He had to be smart; Darla was depending on that. So Eggie ran beside his brother, quickly figuring out that Bubba was going wide around to where the shots were coming from.

The firing continued but now they were hearing screams. Eggie decided to believe all that noise was from the full-humans. It made it easier to keep doing what he needed to do.

Suddenly Bubba made a hard left and charged forward. He was fast and Eggie had to race to catch up. His brother leaped onto a big rock and launched himself off. He caught hold of the leg dangling from a tree branch and yanked. The full-human flipped forward, landing hard on the ground. An M-16 flew out of his hands, but he was already reaching for another weapon attached to his ankle. Frankie ran up, opened his muzzle, and wrapped his jaws around the man’s throat. Ignoring the screaming, Frankie snapped the full-human’s neck and went off looking for more.

Eggie was about to follow when bullets riddled the ground at his feet and he took three steps back. When Eggie stopped, he looked up into the face of a human male—and the automatic weapon he held locked on him.

Darla followed the bear to one of the big trees. The shooter sat on a branch, busy reloading his gun while he made a panicked whimpering sound, his eyes constantly straying to the grizzly charging toward him. The full-human hadn’t been expecting shifters. Then how the hell had he found them? Smithtown, like most shifter-only locations, wasn’t on any maps and was protected by shifters involved in different divisions of the government, military, and National Guard. So the attackers hadn’t just tracked Darla down here.

The grizzly went up on his hind legs and pressed his front paws against the tree trunk. At his full shifted height, this bear was ten feet long but he still couldn’t quite reach the human on the branch. So Darla ran up the bear’s back, launched herself from his hump, and crashed into the human as he was raising the gun to shoot her. She hit him with her full weight, knocking him backward off thebranch. He screamed, the rifle knocked from his hand and his arms pinwheeling. Darla went down with him, the ground rushing up. She waited until the last second to jump from his chest and flip forward. She rolled across the forest floor until she landed flat on her stomach, her front and hind legs spread out. She knew she looked ridiculous but she was alive and unhurt. That’s all she cared about.

Darla heard more shots, more screams, and she knew this had to be stopped. She got to her feet and shifted back to her human form. The bear was busy tearing the now-dead full-human to pieces, which seemed kind of a waste.

She rushed up to him. “Hey. Hey!” Unfortunately the bear was still focused on the man at his feet. So Darla tapped the bear on his shoulder.

As grizzlies were wont to do, he was startled and swung his big forearm at her. Darla squealed and ducked, her arms over her head. Her shifter body could withstand a lot, but she’d rather not spend the next week recovering from a bear mauling.

“Wait, wait, wait!” she yelped.

She heard chuffing, felt bear-breath on her raised arms. She peeked up and saw the bear inches away from her.

“I was just going to suggest,” she squeaked out, “that maybe you and your friend could push the full-humans to the center of the track. That way we could just finish them off all at once.”

The bear gave one more big chuff, making Darla yip, before he lumbered off. She let out a relieved breath.

It was official, grizzlies were the worst!

Darla shifted back to wolf and headed toward the track. It was time to end this.

The human’s gun had jammed. Eggie wasn’t surprised. He knew the weapon and refused to use it because of the jamming issues. Eggie also knew how long it would take the full-human to clear the weapon to make it useable again. So he charged forward, but he never reached the man. A grizzly barreled out of nowhere and ran over the male, then came back and picked the screaming man up by his head, giving a good shake while crushing the human’s skull.

Eggie ran toward the clearing where he guessed the race had taken place. There were two cars in the middle of a rough-hewn track and another car . . . perched in a tree.

Assuming one of the grizzlies had something to do with that, he saw the Barron sisters run down two men and tear them to pieces. He stopped, his gaze searched the track, looking for Darla.

“Run!”

Eggie watched five human males run toward him. Two were taken out by Eggie’s brothers, another blindsided by a She-lion. But the last two ran past, bears hot on their asses.

Too bad they were heading toward a half-circle made up of a few of Eggie’s aunts, uncles, and cousins, in their shifted forms, who had come out of the woods next to Smith territory. Someone must have gone for help.